Scoop: Charlotte lands new bread facility using 30-year-old sourdough starter
A new, massive wholesale bread production facility is opening next month in Charlotte, providing bread and pastries made with North Carolina flour to local businesses.
Restaurateur Jim Noble is opening Boulangerie Copain in June to supply other arms of the Noble Food & Pursuits restaurant group. The facility will be on North Church Street.
Noble said there’s nothing really like the boulangerie in North Carolina, and few full-scale French bread production facilities on the East Coast, aside from New York and Miami.
Bread is a cornerstone for Noble, who taught himself to bake and cook from Julia Child cookbooks while working in the bar business. He owns several restaurants and bakeries, including barbecue restaurant Noble Smoke and Copain Bakery.
“It’s been an amazing process watching this thing come to life. It is a 40-year-old dream,”Noble told CharlotteFive in an exclusive interview. “Barbecue for me, when we finally did Noble Smoke, was focused on being a 30-year-old dream, and now here’s a 40-year dream come to pass. I’m just excited to see it, and I’m happy to work from a North Carolina perspective.”
About Boulangerie Copain
The 10,000 square-foot commercial bakery will be outfitted with two of the largest deck ovens the French manufacturer Bongard has ever produced. The ovens also inject steam, which develops the crust and texture of the bread.
The facility will also draw some inspiration from closer to home:
- It will use a living sourdough starter over three decades old that is still in daily use;
- It will source its flour from Lindley Mills in Graham, North Carolina, an organic family-run manufacturer.
Noble said he is excited to produce properly fermented, carefully made bread. The boulangerie’s signature loaf, the Copain loaf, embodies his idea of what good bread should be.
“I want that kind of bread on my table,” Noble said. “It’s always been a driving force for me since opening my first restaurant in ‘83, really having the right bread.”
The name “Copain” dates back to 12th-century France. It means companion, or “one with whom you share bread.” Noble has used the name for other bakery ventures as well, including one in SouthPark and another in Ballantyne.
Copain’s wholesale operation
Noble was doing some wholesale without the new facility, but was limited in how many accounts his retail sized bakeries could support. The new facility is over twice the size of the space the bakers were using prior, and didn’t have full-sized deck ovens with steam injection like the ones Noble commissioned from Bongard.
The new bakery will provide baked goods to other Noble concepts, including Noble Smoke, Bossy Beulah’s, Roosters, The Jimmy and Copain. Along with providing bakery items to Noble’s other businesses, Copain will sell wholesale to other partners, including The Ballantyne Hotel, Kimpton Hotel, The Westin Hotel and Summit Coffee.
The wholesale kitchen will be overseen by Executive Chef Jennifer Parker.
This story was originally published May 19, 2026 at 6:56 PM.
